A few days ago, I got a mail from an unknown sender, which made me think upon the identity of the sender. After a few days of searching and asking for help from friends, I realized that the mail was from a false id.
But then, when you get an email from a person whose whereabouts are unknown, you definitely would want to know about their identity before you start interacting. Asking them is never the easy option, if their only wish is to play around with you!
So, search engines are the very obvious option you have. What if the sender has not made his profile public, then Google will help you only as much as you can help yourself !
A few tips here, and you have the identity of your mail-sender:
- Trace the sender’s location:In your mail, look for the sender’s details (usually given under the lines “Received: from”) and jot down the sender’s IP address. In case of multiple entries, use the last one. Now, use this IP address in this trace route tool and you get your dear sender’s location.
- Start email search on networking sites:If you don’t get an idea of your sender’s location, we can try the reverse email search on social networking sites like Facebook, TinEye, and LinkedIn etc.With 450 million daily users worldwide, sites likes Facebook and LinkedIn provide you with a high probability of them having their profiles on them which makes it easy for you to know more about them.Once you find them, you can put their pictures to search on sites like Tineye which will give you all other social sites they may be using.
- Check all the other Social Networks:If you have an email id like red.chilies@rocketmail.com, there’s a possibility that you use ‘red.chillies’ as a username for other sites as well. Use a service like Knowem to quickly find out if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networking sites or public forums.
- People Search:
If nothing is working, we can people search on sites like Pipl and Spokeo. These services let us find out people by providing their email. Although Spokeo has a detailed database as compared to Pipl, some of the services provided by Spokeo are available only to their subscribers.Other than regular web documents, Spokeo also has the ability to scan social networks and even the ‘who is who’ information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with a mail ID.
